A pioneer in the biohacking scene since the mid-2000s, Amal Graafstra's been experimenting with RFID implants for more than a decade. Now Graafstra is developing implants that go beyond RFIDs. In episode 2 of Humans+, Motherboard travels to his company Dangerous Things' garage headquarters to get an early look at UKI, a prototype implant focused on encryption that's expected to be released in 2017. Amal hopes that this technology will bring us one step closer to merging our physical and digital identities, but how will society react to having these technologies implanted beneath our skin?

Are we ready for cyborgs? More specifically, people with implants that enhance beyond the superficially cosmetic and into the realms of evolved beings?

Jorge Pelegrín-Borondo (Universidad de La Rioja), Eva Reinares-Lara (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos) and Cristina Olarte-Pascual (Universidad de La Rioja), in cooperation with Professor Kiyoshi Murata, from Meiji University in Tokyo, believe society is ready for this melding of (hu)man and machine.

The Spanish academics’ report "Assessing the acceptance of technological implants (the cyborg): Evidences and challenges" has just been released in the scientific journal Computers in Human Behavior. The report shows a significant proportion of those surveyed are comfortable with the coming cyborg modifications. The group are also collaborating with other academics across the world, including Professor Kiyoshi Murata, for a comparative cross-cultural study roundtable at the 2017 ETHICOMP conference this summer in Turin, Italy.

Quick background: There are already the accepted medical examples: Cochlear implants, pacemakers, cardioverter defibrillators, catheters and heart valves, as well as those that incorporate technology into the body through sensory prostheses: exoskeletons, neuroprostheses, and deep brain stimulation. Then there’s the underground biohacking and transhumanism movement, with Amal Graafstra and his double RFID implants as a notable exponent (you can see him in demo mode here).

Unsurprisingly, tech giants are also looking into the cyborg field, experimenting in the lab and registering intriguing patents: Motorola is investigating a neck implant to improve cellular reception and Nokia might be developing a tattoo that vibrates.

We spoke to the report’s three authors via email recently. In a series of conversations, they explained the theory behind the report, ethical and evolutionary implications of “insideables,” and whether they’d go under the knife to achieve cyborg elite status.

For decades, new drugs have been found in exotic animals and plants. Genes from rare species and subspecies are also useful in producing new breeds, whether by genetic engineering or ordinary cross-breeding. The drugs, and nowadays the new breeds as well, are typically patented. This causes trouble for developing countries that could use them.

Patent monopolies on plant and animal varieties, on genes, and on new medicines, threaten to harm developing countries in three ways. First, by raising prices so far that most citizens have no access to these new developments; second, by blocking local production when the patent owner so chooses; third, for agricultural varieties, by forbidding farmers to continue breeding them as has been done for thousands of years.

Just as the United States, a developing country in the 1800s, refused to recognize patents from advanced Britain, today's developing countries need to protect their citizens' interest by shielding them from such patents. To prevent the problems of monopolies, don't establish monopolies. What could be simpler?

Sensors are cheap and abundant. They’re already in our devices, and soon enough, many of us may elect to carry sensors in and on our bodies, and embed them in our homes, offices, and cities. This terrifies people, Jason Silva says in a new video.

Who hasn’t heard of Big Brother or feared the rise of the surveillance state? But Silva says there’s an upside.

As the world is reduced to “algorithmic cascades of data” he thinks we’ll get what Steven Johnson calls the “long view,” like a microscope or telescope for previously invisible information and datasets.

Billions of sensors measuring location, motion, orientation, pressure, temperature, vital signs and more—each of these will be like a pixel. Seen up close, a modestly flashing primary color. But at a distance, individual pixels dissolve. Discrete points will smooth out into a contiguous image no one could have guessed by looking at each pixel alone.

Hooking the brain up to a computer can do more than let the severely disabled move artificial limbs. It is also revealing the secrets of how we learn

When the patient Scheuermann began losing control of her muscles in 1996, due to her genetic disorder—spinocerebellar degeneration— she gave up her successful business as a planner of murder-mystery-themed events. By 2002 her disease had confined her to a wheelchair, which she now operates by flexing her chin up and down. She retains control of the muscles only in her head and neck. “The signals are not getting from my brain to my nerves,” she explains. “My brain is saying, ‘Lift up!’ to my arm, and my arm is saying, ‘I caaaan't heeeear you.’”

Yet technology now exists to extract those brain commands and shuttle them directly to a robotic arm, bypassing the spinal cord and limbs. Inside Scheuermann's brain are two grids of electrodes roughly the size of a pinhead that were surgically implanted in her motor cortex, a band of tissue on the surface of the brain that controls movement. The electrodes detect the rate at which about 150 of her neurons fire. Thick cables plugged into her scalp relay their electrical activity to a lab computer. As Scheuerman thinks about moving the arm, she produces patterns of electrical oscillations that software on the computer can interpret and translate into digital commands to position the robotic limb. Maneuvering the arm and hand, she can clasp a bar of chocolate or a piece of string cheese before bringing the food to her mouth.

When neuroscientists first set out to develop brain-controlled prostheses, they assumed they would simply record neural activity passively, as if taping a speech at a conference. The transcript produced by the monitored neurons would then be translated readily into digital commands to manipulate a prosthetic arm or leg. “Early on there was this thought that you could really decode the mind,” says neuroscientist Karunesh Ganguly of the University of California, San Francisco.

Yet the brain is not static. This extraordinarily complex organ evolved to let its owner react swiftly to changing conditions related to food, mates and predators. The electrical activity whirring inside an animal's head morphs constantly to integrate new information as the external milieu shifts.

Ganguly's postdoctoral adviser, neuroscientist Jose M. Carmena of the University of California, Berkeley, wondered whether the brain might adapt to a prosthetic device as well. That an implant could induce immediate changes in brain activity—what scientists call neuroplasticity—was apparent even in 1969, when Eberhard Fetz, a young neuroscientist at the University of Washington, reported on an electrode placed in a monkey's brain to record a single neuron. Fetz decided to reward the animal with a banana-flavored pellet every time that neuron revved up. To his surprise, the creature quickly learned how to earn itself more bites of fake banana. This revelation—that a monkey could be trained to control the firing rate of an arbitrary neuron in its brain—is what Stanford University neuroscientist Krishna Shenoy calls the “Nobel Prize moment” in the field of brain-computer interfaces.

Scientists were beginning to discover, however, that neurons can adjust their tuning in response to the software. In a 2009 study Carmena and Ganguly detailed two key ways that neurons begin to learn. Two monkeys spent several days practicing with a robotic arm. As their dexterity improved, their neurons changed their preferred direction (to point down rather than to the right, for example) and broadened the range of firing rates they were capable of emitting. These tuning adjustments gave the neurons the ability to issue more precise commands when they dispatched their missives.

1) That cybernetic patterns of information provide the ultimate and best way to understand reality.

2) That people are no more than cybernetic patterns.

3) That subjective experience either doesn’t exist, or is unimportant because it is some sort of ambient or peripheral effect.

4) That what Darwin described in biology, or something like it, is in fact also the singular, superior description of all creativity and culture.

5) That qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of information systems will be accelerated by Moore’s Law.

And finally, the most dramatic:

6) That biology and physics will merge with computer science (becoming biotechnology and nanotechnology), resulting in life and the physical universe becoming mercurial; achieving the supposed nature of computer software. Furthermore, all of this will happen very soon! Since computers are improving so quickly, they will overwhelm all the other cybernetic processes, like people, and will fundamentally change the nature of what’s going on in the familiar neighborhood of Earth at some moment when a new “criticality”is achieved- maybe in about the year 2020. To be a human after that moment will be either impossible or something very different than we now can know.

But Musk’s plans go beyond this: he wants to use BCIs in a bi-directional capacity, so that plugging in could make us smarter, improve our memory, help with decision-making and eventually provide an extension of the human mind.

“Musk’s goals of cognitive enhancement relate to healthy or able-bodied subjects, because he is afraid of AI and that computers will ultimately become more intelligent than the humans who made the computers,” explains BCI expert Professor Pedram Mohseni of Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, who sold the rights to the name Neuralink to Musk.

A Colorado man made history at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) this summer when he became the first bilateral shoulder-level amputee to wear and simultaneously control two of the Laboratory’s Modular Prosthetic Limbs. Most importantly, Les Baugh, who lost both arms in an electrical accident 40 years ago, was able to operate the system by simply thinking about moving his limbs, performing a variety of tasks during a short training period.

Baugh was in town for two weeks in June as part of an APL-funded research effort to further assess the usability of the MPL, developed over the past decade as part of theRevolutionizing Prosthetics Program. Before putting the limb system through the paces, Baugh had to undergo a surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital known as targeted muscle reinnervation.

“It’s a relatively new surgical procedure that reassigns nerves that once controlled the arm and the hand,” explained Johns Hopkins Trauma Surgeon Albert Chi, M.D. “By reassigning existing nerves, we can make it possible for people who have had upper-arm amputations to control their prosthetic devices by merely thinking about the action they want to perform.”

After recovery, Baugh visited the Laboratory for training on the use of the MPLs. First, he worked with researchers on the pattern recognition system.

“We use pattern recognition algorithms to identify individual muscles that are contracting, how well they communicate with each other, and their amplitude and frequency,” Chi explained. “We take that information and translate that into actual movements within a prosthetic.”

This essay is a re-writing of “The Funeral Ceremonies of the Parsees,” by Jivanji Jamshedji Modi, originally read before the Anthropological Society of Bombay, on September 30, 1891, a fair-use of that content for creative literary aims. To those of the Zoroastrian faith I apologize for my shameless re-purposing of your time-honored traditions. My rationale for doing so is not to diminish or mock these ceremonies and beliefs, but to help contemporary people who are unfamiliar with these practices to look to the interesting and diverse history of human religion for ideas on how we can better understand and use new technology in a harmonious way.

MindRDR, as the app is called, links up Google Glass with another piece of head-mounted hardware, the Neurosky EEG biosensor, to create a communication loop.

The Neurosky biosensor picks up on brainwaves that correlate to your ability to focus. The app then translates these brainwaves into a meter reading that gets superimposed on the camera view in Google Glass. As you “focus” more with your mind, the meter goes up, and the app takes a photograph of what you are seeing in front of you.

As shown during the three last blog’s article (part 1 on Health, part 2 on Artificial Intelligence, part 3 on Robotics), Google is emancipating from its original core business.

luiy's insight:

Before 2013, all purchases of Google were intended to develop and optimize services directly related to Internet (its core business), either in the domain of pictures, or data processing, web analytics, map software, ads, blogging…

Google’s business is in mutation: this company is not focused on the IT domain only but also in the promising field of NBIC. The Nanotechnologies (N), Biology (B), Information technologies (I) and Cognitive sciences (artificial intelligence and brain-related sciences) (C) are improving and converging, in a sense that discoveries in a domain are serving the others domains, and this synergy allow fantastic advances.

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